This Entrepreneur’s Day, we at Finnish Startup Community are highlighting Finnish startups and growth companies that are building solutions to some of society’s most important challenges.
Through the Entrepreneurs Build campaign, we want to shift the focus from entrepreneurship itself to the problems entrepreneurs are working to solve and the impact those solutions can have.
Behind every company is a founder who saw a problem and decided to build a solution.
For Noora Hujala and Heidi Haikala of Solid IO, that problem is a major challenge in cancer treatment: current methods still cannot reliably predict how an individual patient will respond to immunotherapy.
According to the Finnish Cancer Registry, 38,853 new cancer cases were diagnosed in Finland in 2024. Immunotherapy treatments are becoming increasingly advanced, but when a treatment does not work, patients can lose valuable time while facing side effects without benefit. At the same time, increasingly expensive treatments may be given without knowing who is most likely to benefit. (Syöpätilastoraportti – Syöpärekisteri)
As Noora and Heidi put it:
“Because in cancer, time matters. When a treatment doesn’t work, patients can lose precious time while facing side effects without benefit.”
Building a better way to predict treatment response
Solid IO is developing human-based functional precision medicine technology designed to make individual treatment response more predictable, starting with cancer and immunotherapies.
Instead of relying only on existing data or traditional laboratory models, the company generates treatment-response data directly from living patient tumor samples to understand how an individual patient’s tumor responds to different treatments.
The aim is to build a reliable treatment-response prediction capability that can support better treatment decisions and help get the right treatment to the right patient faster.
The same capability could have applications beyond clinical treatment decisions. By generating more clinically relevant information on human treatment response, Solid IO’s technology could also support drug development across different phases, helping pharmaceutical and biotech companies evaluate therapies and treatment response earlier and more effectively.
If Solid IO succeeds, the company believes its technology could help get the right cancer treatment to the right patient faster while reducing significant waste in healthcare and, over time, support more efficient drug development.
In lung cancer alone, Solid IO estimates that ineffective immunotherapy treatments represent €3.5 billion in healthcare spending annually in Europe and $1.4 billion in the United States. For pharmaceutical companies, earlier identification of ineffective drug candidates could represent $5-10 million in savings per drug program.
The potential impact is more effective treatments reaching the market and the right patients faster, ultimately bringing more hope to people living with cancer.
What needs to change in Finland?
Solid IO sees Finland as having world-class science and healthcare. But turning that expertise into globally competitive life science companies requires more than great research.
According to Noora and Heidi, Finland needs more experienced people who have built and scaled companies in this field, more risk capital with the patience and ambition life sciences require, and stronger incentives for hospitals to work with early-stage companies.
For Solid IO, this is a problem worth building for. More stories are coming soon!
Entrepreneurs Build. Because Some Problems Are Too Important to Ignore.